RSS to disown activists if terror links are proved

The RSS has supported Indresh Kumar and two others - Ashok Varshney and Ashok Berry - for their alleged links with Hindutva terrorists but the Sangh will disown them if the links are proven.
"There is no truth in all these allegations. The Sangh works for the welfare of the nation. We will

The RSS has supported Indresh Kumar and two others - Ashok Varshney and Ashok Berry - for their alleged links with Hindutva terrorists but the Sangh will disown them if the links are proven.

"There is no truth in all these allegations. The Sangh works for the welfare of the nation. We will never support violence," said RSS northern India chief Bajrang Lal Gupta when questioned about the RSS links with Hindu terror outfits.

Sources said though the Sangh has radical elements supporting the strategy to target Muslim religious institutions, mosques and madarsas, the RSS cannot be seen to be publicly endorsing such views. In fact, Indresh has become a controversial figure within the RSS especially after the Malegaon blast accused Dayanand Pandey openly accused him of being an " ISI agent". Though senior RSS functionary Madan Das Debi defended Indresh at the time, it is learnt that the Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat has questioned him at least on two occasions after Pandey's disclosures.

"If Pandey is believed to be involved, the Sangh will not support him beyond a point," an RSS insider said.

It is not difficult for the RSS to disown any functionary because it is not a registered organisation.

While all its affiliates such as the VHP/ Sewa Bharati et al are registered in various categories that can collect funds on behalf of the Sangh, the RSS is neither a registered cooperative nor an NGO. So no one has to authorised donations except the quaint fashion of the yearly guru dakshina in envelopes that is apparently voluntary but actually compulsory.

In fact, both the RSS and the BJP are currently following the political line that terror of any kind or religious hue is to be condemned.

But this line emerged only after a meeting between former National Security Adviser M. K. Narayanan and senior BJP leader L. K. Advani.

Advani had, at the time, accused the police of torturing and assaulting Pragya Singh Thakur, an accused in the Malegaon blast being probed by the Mumbai Police's Anti-Terror Squad.

Subsequently, Narayanan apparently met Advani and informed him that the Hindu radicals were actually planning to kill the RSS chief.

The saffron joint family immediately reframed their strategy and the line that has since emerged is that " terror of any kind is condemnable". Neither the BJP nor the RSS has since attempted to advocate Thakur's case.

But with the investigating agencies casting their net wide and more RSS leaders coming under the scanner, the RSS is visibly rattled. Debi met the BJP brass on July 7 to demand legal and political assistance in case the entire outfit is targeted by the Congress-led government.

Subsequently, both Varshney, prant pracharak of Jharkhand and Berry, now a member of the RSS central executive, have discussed their legal options with senior BJP leaders and lawyers Arun Jaitley and Ravi Shankar Prasad.

How seriously the RSS views this threat was visible on Tuesday when the BJP media cell conveners urged individual especially the ones not entirely convinced by their logic that " no Hindu can be a terrorist", to highlight CBI director Ashwani Kumar's statement that no senior RSS member had been interrogated.

BJP president Nitin Gadkari reiterated the CBI director's statement in response to questions about RSS links with militant Hindutva organisations such as Abhinav Bharat. "The whole theory has been negated by the CBI. There is no question of the RSS involvement in any such activity," Gadkari said.

Cases in which Hindutva terror links are suspected:

NANDED/ APRIL 6, 2006: A blast in a house kills two Bajrang Dal workers and four other Hindutva fanatics who were fabricating a bomb